Linguistics and Education 38 (2017) 110

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Linguistics and Education

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/linged

Making sense of not making sense: Novice English language teacher

talk
Phiona Stanleya, , Marie Stevensonb
a
School of Education, UNSW Sydney, Australia
b
School of Education and Social Work, University of Sydney, Australia

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: This qualitative study critically examines the intelligibility of the teacher talk of novice native speaker
Received 8 April 2016 English language teachers. It focuses on difculties teachers face in adjusting their own English so that
Received in revised form their learners can understand them. The paper uses two data sources: learners perceptions of recorded
16 December 2016
teacher talk and analysis of the teacher talk itself. For the teacher talk analysis, the study develops an
Accepted 20 January 2017
integrated framework based on key concepts from Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). This analysis
showed the complex interplay between different levels of meaning, as well as the roles played by both the
Keywords:
immediate situational context and the broader cultural context. In particular, the analysis illustrated the
Novice teachers of English
Teacher talk
crucial roles that both textual meaning (e.g. coherence and cohesion) and context play in the intelligibility
Language grading of teacher talk. The broader implications of the study for research and teaching relating to intercultural
Intelligibility discourse both inside and outside the classroom are discussed.
Cambridge CELTA 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction
The current study was inspired by a tour taken of the historic
Port Arthur penal settlement in Tasmania, Australia. The tour guide,
a speaker of Australian English, was explaining the history of the
settlement to a group of tourists of mixed language backgrounds,
and appeared to be unaware that his commentary was going over
the heads of some. In a segment of the tour, the guide explains:
Now, what was situated there was the stockade, so to call it,
of the barracks, and they had the hospital up the hill here. And
in between the two, very conveniently located, was the og-
ging yard. Now Ill just talk briey for a moment about ogging
because it was a very important part of the culture here for the
rst, rst half of the settlement only. This is because it was a mil-
itary thing, ogging, and the military had been in charge here
for some time and thats the way they treated their own men
for discipline. Here in Port Arthur you could get a maximum of a
hundred lashes. You were tied up to a wooden tripod there and
stretched out like so, very tight on the back muscles. You were
taken to with a cat of nine tails, a wooden-handled instrument,
yay so long, with nine separate pieces of either hemp, rope or
leather attached to it with little knots tied up inside each one
Corresponding author.
E-mail address: phiona.stanley@unsw.edu.au (P. Stanley).
of those pieces. And generally speaking after, and after thirty or
forty lashes youd start to get bone exposed, and beyond that
youd start to get basically a quivering mess of jelly, there, on
your back.
(Excerpt from Port Arthur tour commentary, recorded 5 Feb
2013)
In addition to his Australian accent, the tour guides speech is full
of specialized vocabulary, colloquialisms, and structural complex-
ity. Reection on this experience inspired the present study: if a
tour guide working with international visitors seemingly had little
awareness of how to grade his own English for global listeners,
might the same be true of teachers working with English language
learners?
Teachers in English language classrooms, particularly novice
teachers, may be unaware of how difcult their language use
can be for their learners to understand. Even those who are
aware of potential pitfalls may nevertheless nd it challenging to
adjust their language appropriately. The skill of language grading
is therefore taught on some English language teacher-education
courses, and Thornbury and Watkins (2007) dene language grad-
ing as the way teachers simplify their classroom language in
the interests of intelligibility (p. 207). They offer the following
advice:
Adjusting your language for the level of the learners you are
teaching can be very difcult but is a very important teaching
skill. It is important that the models you give learners remain

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.linged.2017.01.001
0898-5898/ 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
2 P. Stanley, M. Stevenson / Linguistics and Education 38 (2017) 110
reasonably natural because learners will pick these up. The lan-
guage which it is appropriate to use with a low level class will
be signicantly different from the language used with a higher
class, although it should remain natural. It is not necessary that
learners understand every word you say (p. 34).
This study investigates this issue of language grading and exa-
mines the intelligibility of teacher talk of three trainee teachers
teaching mixed nationality learners. The teachers were enrolled in
a Cambridge Certicate in Teaching English to Speakers of Other
Languages (CELTA) course in Australia. This setting has been cho-
sen because pre-service TESOL teacher education courses such as
CELTA are an arena in which language grading skills are explicitly
taught to novice teachers.
2. Teacher talk in the language classroom
Teacher talk is talk in which teachers engage in the classroom.
It is sometimes also referred to as classroom discourse, a broader
term that encompasses both teacher and student talk. Christie
(2002) distinguishes two registers of teacher talk that are interwo-
ven in patterned ways to form the fabric of classroom teaching: a
regulative register (e.g. setting goals, giving instructions, sequenc-
ing tasks) and an instructional register (i.e. content being taught).
Whereas teacher talk in mainstream classrooms has been
described as decontextualized, complex and cognitively demand-
ing (Schleppegrell, 2004, p. xi), teacher talk in language classrooms
is generally characterized in terms of its simplication. Teachers
grade their language to take into account the language prociency
of their learners. These modications have been described pri-
marily in terms of formal categories, such as phonology, lexis and
syntax. In terms of phonology, teachers make adjustments such as
slowing their rate of speech and articulating more clearly by avoid-
ing features of connected speech such as contractions, liaison and
assimilation (Ivanova, 2011). Studies have also shown that teachers
tend to use higher frequency vocabulary items, fewer pronouns and
less complex syntactic structures (Saito & van Poeteren, 2012).
Teacher talk in the language classroom has some similarities
with other forms of modied talk such as caretaker talk (the reg-
ister adults use when talking to children) and foreigner talk (the
register that native-speakers use when talking to non-native speak-
ers in situations outside the classroom). Despite its similarities
to other forms of modied talk, however, it is generally recog-
nized that language classroom discourse comprises a distinct genre
with distinctive rhetorical features, such as the two registers iden-
tied above by Christie, and shaped by its social purpose (e.g.
Hallett, 2000). Purposes of teacher talk in the language classroom
that set it apart from other kinds of talk both inside and out-
side the classroom are its role in modeling the target language
for learners and providing input that assists them in acquiring this
language.
Theorization and research on teacher talk in English-language
classrooms has historically been built on the notion of the native
speaker (NS) teacher as the model of prociency to which language
learners should aspire (Doherty & Singh, 2008), and teachers are
often instructed to avoid the kinds of ungrammatical modica-
tions found in foreigner talk outside the classroom (e.g. Thornbury
& Watkins, 2007). In addition, teachers being trained in commu-
nicative language teaching (CLT) are instructed to make use of
context to illustrate meaning and to create opportunities for learn-
ers to negotiate meaning. The application of these instructional
techniques in the classroom has consequences for the discourse
structure, interaction patterns, and linguistic choices in the instruc-
tional register, thus adding to the challenges that trainee teachers
face in grading their language.
Little attention has been given to the difculties that teachers
may have in juggling accuracy and intelligibility. Difculties with
language grading is an issue of importance for teacher training, and
ultimately also has broader potential implications for communica-
tion in settings outside the classroom as well.
3. Theoretical perspectives
Broadly, we distinguish three theoretical perspectives in schol-
arship on teacher talk in the language classroom: the input
perspective, the intelligibility perspective, and the interaction per-
spective. The input perspective views teacher talk in terms of
whether it provides comprehensible input for the purpose of lan-
guage acquisition; the intelligibility perspective views teacher talk
in terms of whether it can be understood; and the interaction
perspective views classroom interactions between teachers and
students in terms of their broader social and pedagogical dimen-
sions. The brief overview below focuses only on the rst two
perspectives, as these are most relevant to the current study, which
focuses on teacher discourse only. For teacher talk research with an
interactional perspective, see Thornbury (1996), Walsh (2002), and
Gibbons (2003).
The input perspective, which dominated research in the 1980s,
was strongly inuenced by Krashens (1982) input hypothesis on
the development of learners interlanguage. This hypothesis stated
that for learners to develop from their current level of interlanguage
(stage i) to a higher level (stage i + 1) learners needed to be exposed
to input that contains i + 1. Krashen made a distinction between
roughly tuned and nely tuned input, and emphasized that natural,
communicative, roughly-tuned, comprehensible input was prefer-
able to nely-tuned input that aims directly at i + 1. Thus, Krashen
believed that in order to comprehend the teacher, learners did not
need to understand every word and that teachers could make use of
contextual information and world knowledge to support compre-
hension. Apart from describing modications that teachers make
to their discourse, research carried out within this perspective has
also examined areas such as whether input modications lead to
language acquisition (e.g. Loschky, 1994), the aspects of input mod-
ication most critical to comprehension (e.g. Parker & Chaudron,
1987) and factors affecting learners attention to teacher talk (e.g.
Wang, 2015).
The intelligibility perspective focuses on the extent to which
speakers of different varieties of English, including NS varieties,
can make themselves intelligible to listeners beyond their own lan-
guage variety, including learners of English as a second (ESL) or
foreign language (EFL). This perspective has its origins in World
Englishes scholarship that examines the cross-varietal intelligibil-
ity of Englishes and the speech accommodation that takes place
when speakers of different varieties of English communicate. Ini-
tially, this scholarship focused predominantly on pronunciation,
and in particular, accent. However, the focus was broadened by
scholars such as Smith (1992) and Nelson (2011), who developed a
tripartite intelligibility framework. This framework distinguishes
three aspects of intelligibility: intelligibility, comprehensibility,
and interpretability. Somewhat confusingly, as well as referring
to the superordinate term, intelligibility is also a category in
the framework that refers to the decoding of the phonology of
words and utterances, including recognizing boundaries, distin-
guishing combinations of sounds, and word and sentence stress
patterns. This latter meaning of intelligibility is sometimes referred
to as phonological intelligibility (Berns, 2008). Comprehensibility
refers to understanding propositional meaning, and interpretabil-
ity refers to understanding speakers communicative intentions,
that is, the illocutionary force underlying utterances. The notion of
interpretability encompasses semantics and speech acts, but does
 P. Stanley, M. Stevenson / Linguistics and Education 38 (2017) 110
not appear to cover aspects of textual meaning such as coherence
and cohesion, nor to consider the role of context and culture in
understanding utterances.
Underlying this framework is the view that intelligibility, in the
superordinate sense, is not an absolute quality imbued in any vari-
ety of English (including native Englishes), but rather is relative
to the variety of English, whether native or non-native, of both
the speaker and listener. Whereas in the input perspective the
value of the NS teacher as an idealized source of comprehensible
input was emphasized, the intelligibility perspective raises ques-
tions regarding the value of NS teacher talk. These questions pertain
to issues such as the localized nature of NSs knowledge of English
and to their perceived lack of knowledge of learners cultures and
the values and experiences that learners are likely to have (Doherty
& Singh, 2008).
Research from an intelligibility perspective has primarily looked
at speech accommodation of NSs and non-NSs outside the class-
room, and there has so far been little focus on teachers attempts
at language grading in classrooms. However, Doherty and Singh
(2008) conducted a critical examination of NS teacher talk in which
they identied aspects of NS teacher talk that are likely to be dif-
cult for English language learners to understand. They looked
at shifts in the discourse, referred to as frames, including shifts
between regulatory and instructional registers and shifts within
the instructional register. Two main areas of difculty identied
were unclear or overly frequent discourse shifts and unnecessary
syntactic complexity in question phrasing. This analysis provided
insights about issues in teacher talk that could potentially impact
on intelligibility, but did not provide evidence concerning whether
these actually impacted on learners understanding. The analysis
specically focused on discourse structure, but did not consider
other issues that may impact intelligibility.
The current study takes learners perceptions of the intelligi-
bility of teacher talk as its starting point, and provides a holistic
framework for analyzing issues related to intelligibility. As previous
research has not considered how novice English language teachers
grapple with language grading, the current study makes this its
focus.
4. The current study
The current study is a qualitative study that uses data from two
sources to examine the difculties that novice English language
teachers have with grading their teacher talk to make it under-
standable to their mixed language background learners. It examines
focus group discussions with learners about difculties in under-
standing video-recorded teacher talk, and provides textual analyses
of the same teacher talk to obtain further insights into the features
that are involved in this lack of understanding.
The video-recorded classroom vignettes discussed in this paper
were identied by learners as being difcult for them to under-
stand, and we give voice to the learners by examining their
perceptions of what was difcult about the teacher talk and why.
The researchers then extend the students critiques by analyzing
the same vignettes. Thus, the study includes both learners voices
and researchers voices in examining why specic examples of
teacher talk are difcult to understand.
We take an intelligibility perspective in which we view lan-
guage grading by teachers in the language classroom as a form
of speech accommodation. Within this, we view the English lan-
guage classroom as a particular kind of international English setting
with a distinctive pedagogical purpose. We posit that just as the
Port Arthur tour guide situation warrants an international English,
so do many English-language classrooms where the students
objective is to acquire English for international communication.
3
However, grading their own language towards such an interna-
tional English may be challenging for teachers, particularly novice
ones.
In contrast to much previous research that has taken the native-
speaker as the gold standard, the current study challenges the
dominant language-learning paradigm of NS-as-language-expert
and NNS-as-novice by re-positioning NNSs as evaluators of NS
teacher talk, and also by critically examining the teacher talk of
novice teachers who are native-speakers. However, we acknowl-
edge that NNS teachers may also nd it challenging to grade their
English for learners. We also acknowledge that the very notion of
nativeness is highly contested linguistically and politically (e.g.
Holliday, 2006). It is not within the scope of this paper to con-
tribute to the discussion of who is or is not a native speaker or
debate at length whether the term is meaningful or legitimate; for
a book-length study of these questions, see Davies (2003). The term
native speaker is used here, tentatively, as it remains the ghost in
the machine of English language teaching (Cook, 2016, p. 187). This
is to say that the ELT profession remains powerfully divided by this
problematic binary. In this paper we do not intend to reinscribe this
binary but to reect, as Cook, Holliday, Davies, and others do, that
it still very much divides ELT classrooms and staffrooms. For the
purposes of this study, then, we employ a working denition of a
native speaker as someone who has used a language from earliest
childhood and whose education has been undertaken in that lan-
guage. The teachers in this study all learned British, Australian, or
North American English (and only English) from early childhood,
and were educated entirely in English. Unlike some writers (e.g.
Jenkins, 2006) we do not conate nativeness with monolingualism,
although the native-speakers in this study are either monolingual
users of English or are English-dominant bilinguals whose addi-
tional language/s were acquired after childhood.
Specically, the three teachers whose work is discussed in this
paper are Monica, Julian, and Cindy (all pseudonyms), who are orig-
inally from the UK, Australia, and the USA respectively. All were
living in Sydney at the time of the CELTA course. Cindy and Julian
are also users of French and Spanish respectively, with both having
acquired second languages in adulthood: Cindy lived in Belgium
for several years and Julian speaks some Spanish at home with his
Peruvian wife. Monica, on the other hand, calls herself monolingual.
The vignettes analyzed in this study are from the lead-in stage
of lessons taught by trainee teachers as part of their CELTA course.
A prototypical CLT lesson starts with what Scrivener (2011) terms
a lead-in before the target language or text/topic for macro skills
development is presented. This lead-in is intended to create a com-
municative context for the presentation of new target-language
items so that learners can more clearly see the meaning and use
of these items or, in the case of macro-skills lessons, the lead-in
segues into the topic, to engage learners interest and to activate rel-
evant schemata. The language in the lead-in is graded to students
approximate prociency level, and teachers support and check stu-
dents understandings, for example by using visuals, realia, mime
and gesture, and/or elicitation techniques.
4.1. Theoretical framework
In this study, we dene intelligibility as the degree to which
listeners can make sense of spoken discourse in a manner that
appears to approximate the speakers intended meaning. We delib-
erately express ourselves tentatively in relation to the speakers
intended meanings in the classroom vignettes, as direct evidence
of the speakers intending meanings is lacking.
We aim to provide a comprehensive framework for the analy-
sis of understandability in spoken discourse. Whereas the Nelson
and Smith intelligibility framework is based on formal categories:
phonology (intelligibility), grammar and lexis (comprehensibility)
4 P. Stanley, M. Stevenson / Linguistics and Education 38 (2017) 110
and pragmatics (interpretability), our proposed framework takes
a functional approach, using key concepts from SFL. This captures
aspects of intelligibility missing in the Nelson and Smith framework
that are related to coherence, cohesion, contextual knowledge, and
broader cultural knowledge. It also enables us to illustrate the inter-
play between these different aspects of discourse in contributing
to lack of understanding.
SFL makes a distinction between context of situation and con-
text of culture. According to Halliday and Hasan (1985), context of
situation is the immediate situational context surrounding a text,
and context of culture is the broader cultural background against
which a text is interpreted. While the notion of culture is much
contested, we draw upon Scollon, Scollon Wong, and Joness (2012,
p. 3) denition:
[A] way of dividing people up into groups according to some
feature of these people which help us to understand something
about them and how they are different from or similar to other
people.
This means that culture is expressed in the attitudes, behaviors, and
meanings that are common to a particular group, and that group
identity is based on putative homogeneity in characteristics that
may include, for example, ethnicity or professional afliation. In
this study, the notions of context of situation and context of culture
will be employed to assist in explaining why some elements of the
teacher talk may be difcult to understand.
SFL distinguishes ideational, interpersonal and textual meta-
functions (Halliday, 1985). The ideational metafunction refers to
those resources that represent the world and both our outer and
inner experiences in the world. Inner experiences include beliefs
and abstract ideas. Experiences are encoded in language through
lexical meanings and grammatical relationships within the clause,
as well as syntactic relations between clauses.1 The interpersonal
function refers to those resources that represent the relationship
between the addressor and the addressee, including mood, modal-
ity and lexis that evaluates people, objects and situations. The
textual metafunction refers to those resources that manage the
ow of discourse. Through the textual metafunction, meanings are
combined into a coherent whole. The resources associated with
the textual metafunction include discourse structure, referred to
as schematic structure; information structure (i.e. theme/rheme),
which refers to the order of information in clauses and how this
is patterned throughout the discourse, and cohesive devices such
as referencing, and conjunctions. See Halliday (1985) for a fuller
description. In this study, we use these metafunctions as the broad
basis of a taxonomy that allows us to analyze aspects of teacher
talk that are difcult to understand. The framework used is shown
in Table 1.
4.2. Participants and setting
This study was conducted on a ten-week CELTA course in
Sydney, Australia from August to October 2013. The institution
that runs the CELTA offers free English lessons two evenings per
week, and students are aware that their teachers are still in train-
ing. Teaching practice on CELTA is thus conducted with real
language students (as opposed to peer teaching, as on some pre-
service ELT courses). The adult students, whose English-language
1
SFL divides ideational meaning into experiential meaning, in which Transitiv-
ity plays a key role (i.e. the processes expressed in clauses, such as who is doing
what to whom), and logical meaning, which concerns logical relations between
clauses. However, these distinctions are not explicitly incorporated into the frame-
work of the current study, as it goes beyond the scope of the study to provide detailed
explanations or analyses of these specic ideational sub-systems.
Table 1
Framework for analyzing intelligibility.
Context Context of culture
Context of situation
Ideational meaning Lexical complexity
Grammatical complexity
Interpersonal meaning Mood
Modality
Evaluative lexis
Textual meaning Schematic structure
Cohesion
Information structure
prociency ranged from pre-intermediate to upper intermediate,
were from a variety of countries: a majority were Japanese, Korean,
or Chinese, and a few were Brazilian, Colombian, or Italian. Most
students were young adults and most were in Australia tempo-
rarily. Most of the Korean, Japanese, and Italian students were on
Working Holiday visas (WHVs), undertaking extended sojourns in
Australia comprising paid work (often in hospitality), some English
studies, and tourism. Some students, primarily those from China,
were the partners of student-visa holders, often those undertak-
ing research degrees. And a few students, primarily Colombians
and Brazilians (who are ineligible for Australian WHVs) were on
student visas and undertaking daytime studies, usually in business
colleges. Because of students demographics and motivations, we
would describe this particular setting as an EFL rather than an ESL
(English as a Second Language) setting: most students purpose was
to acquire English for wider international communication rather
than to settle longer term in Australia.
Lessons of ve trainee teachers were recorded, but vignettes
from only three teachers lessons are discussed in this paper. These
particular vignettes were chosen because they showcase different
language grading issues and because NNS students described them
as difcult for them to understand.
4.3. Data collection
The participant trainee teachers consented to having three of
their teaching practice lessons recorded at early, mid and late stages
of the CELTA course (n = 3 hours of teaching per trainee; 15 hours
video recording in total). All classroom observations and recordings
were conducted by Phiona Stanley, who also made notes during
the lessons as to where students seemed to be having difculties
in understanding. After the end of the CELTA course, Phiona then
re-watched the classroom videos and selected 18 free-standing
teacher-talk segments that were then edited together to form a
seventeen-minute highlights reel video. The chosen segments
were all those in which, according to the researchers notes, the
students in class had appeared to struggle in some way. In this
video, the 18 segments were marked onscreen as Teacher 1, les-
son 1, Teacher 2, lesson 1, and so on, but no other contextualizing
information and no subtitles were provided. No video editing (e.g.
pixelating teachers faces or adding subtitles) occurred before stu-
dents were shown the video. The teachers in the video had all given
permission for undisguised recordings of their teaching to be used
in the study.
Six focus groups, each lasting about two hours, were then orga-
nized with volunteer learners whose English prociency ranged
from pre-intermediate to advanced. Each group comprised 57 stu-
dents (total n = 37 students), none of whom had been in the original
lessons. These participants were studying English at different lan-
guage centers around Sydney, not in the CELTA institution. The
recruitment of different students was for ethical reasons, as the
students were asked to evaluate teacher talk and this necessarily
 P. Stanley, M. Stevenson / Linguistics and Education 38 (2017) 110
produced some decit discourses about the trainee teachers. All but
one of these groups comprised same-rst-language speakers (i.e.
two groups of Japanese students, two groups of Brazilian students,
one group of Chinese students, and one mixed-nationality, higher-
level group comprising two students from Korea and one each from
France, Slovakia, Switzerland, the Czech Republic, and Colombia).
The mixed nationality group used English as their lingua franca.
Qualied, commercially hired interpreters were provided to
all but the mixed nationality group. Each group was shown the
highlights reel and was asked to comment, in English or through
interpreters as they preferred, on: (1) Exactly what they had under-
stood of each segment of the recording and (2) What was easy or
difcult to understand about the segment, and (if they could articu-
late it), why? The rationale was to access learners own perceptions
rather than imposing researchers sense of what should be easy or
difcult for them to understand.
In most cases, the learners chose to communicate directly in
English with Phiona, who also conducted the focus groups. The
researchers questions, (e.g. what did you understand? Was it easy
or difcult? Why?) were deliberately graded so as to minimize
the need to use interpreters. However, in all groups, some learn-
ers asked interpreters for help with translating individual words
and phrases into English. There were also a few exchanges where
the researcher asked for clarication, necessitating some back and
forth communication via the interpreter to clarify what exactly the
learner had intended to say. Although there is no absolute certainty
that these translations fully captured students intended mean-
ings accurately, the researcher who conducted the focus group
has an understanding of Portuguese (the language of two Brazil-
ian groups), and so was able to check that the students original
utterances were very close in meaning and nuance to the English
versions. This provided some evidence for the accuracy of the inter-
pretations.
In each focus group, the interviewer paused the video recor-
ding after each segment to allow students to comment. Students
were also given a second remote control and asked to pause the
recording when there was something on which they wished to
comment. There was much negotiation between the students (in
English and in students rst languages, with minimal interpreter
involvement) as to what the teachers intended meanings on the
video were, and there was a broad consensus between groups as to
which teachers/segments were generally clearer or more opaque.
These focus groups were audio-recorded and the students
English-language contributions and the interpreters English-
language renderings of students L1 commentaries were then
transcribed. The three vignettes chosen for analysis in this paper
were all segments of the lead-in parts of lessons that students found
confusing and/or difcult to follow, although their reasons varied.
Lead-ins were chosen as the researchers notes and the focus group
discussions had revealed that it was often this part of the lesson that
students found difcult to understand. The three vignettes of lead-
ins were chosen by the researchers to showcase a range of issues
that, together, illustrate our proposed framework of language grad-
ing components.
The focus group interviews provided information on what the
students perceived as easy or difcult, often including students
perceptions of why this was the case. Most students articulated rea-
sons they perceived a given segment was difcult to understand
and there were plenty of suggestions for improvement, often in
critical terms of what the trainee teachers should do, or could do
better. However, none of the students are linguists. While their
reections are a useful starting point for unpacking and analyz-
ing the teacher-talk texts, we take their initial analyses further in
this paper by also providing a textual analysis of the three teacher
talk vignettes. Thus the analysis of the teacher-talk presented here
draws upon and also extends the students critiques.
5
Table 2
Transcription system.
Bold Ideational meaning:
Italics Interpersonal meaning;
Underlined Textual meaning:
Numbered subscripts(1a) Reference chains (i.e. Elements with a
referential relationship)
(.) Pause
() Non-verbal cues are provided in round
brackets
[inaudible] Inaudible utterances are provided in
square brackets
CAPITAL Speech that is noticeably louder than
the surrounding speech
>< Talk that is more rapid
The data management for this project also included making
the three vignettes analyzed in this paper available for readers;
these are linked as video les in Appendix A. At times there are
sound issues in these videos, as the recordings were made in busy
classrooms in which students were moving around. This of course
affected students comprehension too, both in the live classrooms
and subsequent video-viewing focus groups. It was also neces-
sary, for inclusion in this paper, to split the videos into stand-alone
segments and to pixelate the teachers faces, for the ethical rea-
son of anonymity. For the same reason, participant institutions
are not identied and all participant names used in this paper are
pseudonyms.
4.4. Data analysis
For the analysis, both the student focus group discussions
and the teacher talk vignettes were transcribed. Excerpts of the
focus group discussions and full transcriptions of the teacher talk
vignettes are provided in the results. The vignettes were tran-
scribed using the transcription system shown in Table 2. The
vignettes have been divided into rhetorical stages that reect the
schematic structure, and these stages are indicated with numbers
and letters (e.g. 1a, 1b).
In the analysis of the focus groups, features of the teacher talk
that students reported as difcult to understand were identied
through content analysis. This means that where students com-
ments on teachers intelligibility were negative, their reasons were
coded to produce an inductive understanding of the types of issues
that they identied. These are described under each of the lesson-
segment headings below.
In the textual analysis of the teacher talk transcripts, the tran-
scription system shown in Table 2 is used to categorize those
features in the teacher talk identied by the researchers to be of
a high level of semantic or grammatical complexity. These fea-
tures were identied by the researchers, as the focus groups made
general statements about the trainee teachers intelligibility rather
than pointing out specic features in the teacher talk that they
found difcult. For each of the three vignettes, a full transcript with
contextualizing information is provided, followed by the students
perspectives, and then our analysis, which builds on the students
perspectives.
5. Results
5.1. Monica, Holidays
Monica sets the scene for an upper intermediate lesson by using
three photos to elicit a pair-work discussion on students pre-
ferred holidays. However, the photos are not very clear, resulting
in teacher talk in which Monica deals with the lack of clarity of the
photos.
6 P. Stanley, M. Stevenson / Linguistics and Education 38 (2017) 110
Monica: 1a okay so Id like you to look at these pictures1a (.)
(gestures at pictures projected on whiteboard) 1b and (.) Id
like you to discuss with the person next to you (.) (picks up
notes on desk) 1c which of these holidays in the photos1b
appeals to you the most and why (.)(reads from notes, then
looks at class and then gestures at pictures on whiteboard) 1d
so if you could talk to the person next to you after looking at
them1c if you cant see (.) (waves with hand, then puts notes
back on desk, then gestures at photos again) 2a it1d did come
out better before(.) (shifts position of photos on Overhead
Projector (OHP) slightly) 3a this one is a mountain scene this
ones a beach(.) (points at two photos on whiteboard) 2b its
hard to tell (.)
Students: [inaudible] (Laughter)
Monica: 2c its really hard to tell I (.) thought it1e would
come out better but it1f didnt (.) (goes back and forth
between the OHP and the whiteboard) 3b this one is more like
a (.) (points at photo then goes back to OHP to check the photo)
Student: [Inaudible]
Monica: 3c I think it is someone looking at some natives so its
supposed to be like (.) perhaps somewhere in the mountains
some kind of backpacker trip (.) (goes back and forth between
the OHP and the whiteboard) 3d and this one is someone
exploring a glacier so its very cold (.) (points at third photo,
and then returns to OHP to adjust photo) 3e so I think beach,
mountain and this is an adventure trip (.) (looks at whiteboard,
and points to each of the three photos in turn) 1e okay so if you
could talk to the person next to you (.)
5.1.1. Student perspective
Students commented favorably on Monicas varied intonation
but made comments about her rate of speech, such as that she
connects more the words (Japanese female, group 2, in English),
that she always continues (Brazilian male, group 5, via interpreter)
and that she moves very quickly (Chinese female, group 3, via
interpreter). Effects on understanding were described as follows:
Swiss female: If you stop, if you dont understand
one word and you stop
[understanding], and after its
gone. The train is out.
Czech male: Yep.
Researcher: So the trains going too fast?
Czech male: Youre right.
Swiss female: You cant catch it.
(Student focus group 6,
original in English)
Other phonological intelligibility issues mentioned were that Mon-
ica turned her back while speaking and that her hair sometimes
obscured her face.
No students mentioned difculties with grammar or lexical
items, and although many agreed that the photocopied pictures
were unclear, they appreciated that Monica apologized for this.
Paradoxically, however, the students reported that Monicas apol-
ogy for the picture quality had a negative effect on textual meaning:
If you talk about, say, a holiday and in that context talk about
mountain or the sea, one makes the connection, one under-
stands. But if you do get other concepts in then one is lost
completely. . . . Shes talking about the holidays but shes also
talking about the paper or something. If youre explaining some-
thing, you close the [rst] topic. Then start [the next one]. Thats
how my brain works.
(Brazilian female, Group 5, via interpreter)
5.1.2. Researcher perspective
The unclear pictures impede Monica in establishing a clear
context of situation, and lead her to engage in teacher talk that
was otherwise unnecessary. As the Brazilian student cited above
points out, this teacher talk contains confusing shifts. The schematic
structure shows that that discourse shifts back and forth between
three registers: a regulatory register (1a1e) in which Monica gives
instructions to the students; a commentative register (2a2c) in
which Monica verbalizes her internal thoughts concerning the
lack of clarity of the photos; and an instructional register (3a3e)
in which she compensates for the lack of clarity by describ-
ing the photos to the students. The commentative register and
the instructional register are both embedded in the regulatory
register. Both the start of the regulatory register in 1a and the
resumption of this in 1e are marked by the discourse marker OK.
However, the back and forth shifts between instructional and com-
mentative registers are not clearly marked. Although there are
pauses at the shifts between the instructional and commenta-
tive registers, these pauses are not distinguishable from pauses
that occur within each of these two registers, and no discourse
markers or non-verbal signals are provided. Moreover, back and
forth movements by Monica between the OHP and the white-
board within each of these registers create a complex pattern of
physical shifts that serve to accentuate the choppiness of the dis-
course.
Each of the three registers also contains complex interpersonal
expressions of modality, which may impact on the understand-
ability of each. In the regulatory register, modal expressions are
used for politeness; in the commentative register they are used to
express conditionality, and in the instructional register they are
used to express uncertainty about what is depicted in the photos.
The requests in the instructional register in 1d could have been
simplied to something like: Look at the photos. Talk to the person
next to you about. . ..
Each of the three registers also contains complex ideational
meanings. In the regulatory register, the question that Monica
asks the students to discuss is embedded in a subordinate clause,
although there is a pause between the main and subordinate clause
(1b). The embedded question contains the verb appeals to, instead
of a simpler verb such as like or prefer. In the instructional reg-
ister, many words are used to convey the meaning of the three
pictures, which if they had been clear, should themselves have
been sufcient to illustrate meaning. The use of the words glacier
and natives may also be unfamiliar to the students, not least as
natives has limited usage due to its negative connotative mean-
ing.
In the commentative register, complex ideational and textual
meanings intertwine. Firstly, it did come out better (2a) and its
hard to tell (2b) are used respectively as ideational grammati-
cal metaphors for it was clearer and its hard to see the photos
clearly. Secondly, there is a shift in 2a from the students as agent
in to the photos as agent. In terms of textual meaning, this shift
is complicated by a lack of cohesiveness in the reference chain for
the photos that starts in 1a. In the regulatory register, the chain has
plural nominal referential terms (i.e. these pictures (1a), the photos
(1c)), but in the commentative register singular pronominal refer-
ences are used (i.e. it in 2a and 2c). It is also complicated by the
elision of the relative clause what the photos show in its hard to
tell (2b, 2c).
5.2. Julian, The Folder
Julian sets the scene in this lower intermediate lesson, in which
students are asked to discuss the question: What things do you
never leave home without? He illustrates the meaning of to never
leave home without something by acting out a scene in which
he gets on a bus and then realizes that he has left his folder at
home. Julian then gives the students instructions for the pair-work
discussion.
 P. Stanley, M. Stevenson / Linguistics and Education 38 (2017) 110
Julian: 1a every day I do a little bit of work on my English (.)
(standing in middle of classroom) 2a the other day (.) (walks
across classroom and picks up bag at front of classroom) 2b I
got on the bus with my bag (.) (walks across classroom holding
bag, mimes getting on bus) 2c sat down pulled out (.) (mimes
sitting down and opening bag) 2d I didnt have my folder1 (.)
(slaps his head in frustration) 2e oh my God (.) (turns around
towards desk) 2f it1 was back on my desk at home (.) (points to
a folder on the classroom desk) 3a so now every day I put this
folder1 in this bag thats where it1 lives (.) (walks over to desk
and starts to put folder in the bag, but doesnt actually put it
in) 3b I never leave home without it1 okay (.)
(holds folder up and then puts it on the desk again) 4a in
pairs(.) (makes a circling gesture with arms) 4b talk about
(.) what things do you never leave home without (.) 4c
okay? (.) (turns on OHP to show question: What things do you
never leave home without?) 4d in pairs in pairs and you three
together (walks around gesturing to place students in pairs)
5.2.1. Student perspective
Some student groups discussed this segment at length, all
saying they found it quite difcult to understand. One student
mentioned phonological intelligibility issues, commenting on
Julians at intonation. Almost all groups grasped the idea that
Julian had forgotten something at home (Brazilian female, group
5, in English). However, several students said that their under-
standing came mainly from paralinguistic information: many said
they appreciated Julians mime with his empty bag and his facial
expression. For example:
Japanese Female: [Interpreted] Just a little
bit, I understood a little bit.
Researcher: What did you understand?
Japanese Female: [Interpreted] He forgot
something at home.
Researcher: Very good.
Japanese Female: [Interpreted] Is that right?
Researcher: Thats right. How did you
understand this?
Japanese Female: [Interpreted] So because of
the gesture and he has a
bag and theyre talking
about talking something
with the bag and things,
thats why.
(Japanese female,
group 1, via interpreter)
However, at least one student (Japanese male, group 2, via inter-
preter) did not know what it was that Julian had left behind, and
group 6 (mixed group) joked that it was strange that something as
large as a full folder could be so easily forgotten. Students appeared
to have grasped the concept of leaving something behind but only
two groups, both after re-watching the excerpt, were able to state
the task (discuss things you never leave home without). One stu-
dent queried whether the task was about going home (Japanese
group 1, via interpreter). No students commented unprompted on
the task setup and all focused on the story of having left something
at home.
5.2.2. Researcher perspective
Julian has difculty establishing a clear context of situation,
as the story, which is a personal recount, that he acts out in
moves 13 illustrates to leave something at home, but does
not illustrate to never leave home without something. This
7
mismatch may explain why some of the learners failed to grasp
that the focus of the vignette was supposed to be the latter
expression. This mismatch is compounded by the complexity of
the expression, which is an ideational grammatical metaphor,
the underlying meaning of which is I always take it with me.
As the expression was not the point of the lesson, it appears
that the simpler it I always take it with me would have suf-
ced.
Textual meaning also seems to be a source of complexity in the
discourse. At face value, the schematic structure seems relatively
straightforward. The structure involves a shift from instructional
(moves 13) to regulatory register (move 4), in which the task
instructions are given, and this shift is clearly marked by the
discourse marker ok. The internal structure of the story, which
is a recount, is quite typical: Move 1 is the orientation, move
2 is the events, and move 3 is the evaluation, and this struc-
ture involves shifts between present tense (moves 1 and 3) and
past tense (move 2). However, the shifts within the recount
involve complex interweaving of verbal and non-verbal informa-
tion.
Firstly, these shifts involve profound changes in deixis. Through-
out move 2 and in move 3a the desk at the front of the classroom
represents home, with the area in the middle of the classroom rep-
resenting the bus. However, the audience is not made aware of
this deictic relationship between the desk and home until move
2f. Moreover, somewhere in move 3a, the desk ceases to repre-
sent home. Julian mimes putting the folder in the bag, but does
not actually put it in, which represents a mismatch with his words
in 3a, in which he claims that the folder is always in his bag.
Even more confusingly in 3b, Julian states that he never leaves
home without the folder, yet at the same time, he places the
folder on the desk, which in the previous utterance, represented
home.
Secondly, both verbal and non-verbal information contribute
to lack of cohesiveness in the referential relationships relating
to folder. Although the folder is central to the recount, it is
not introduced into the discourse until move 2d. Although it is
introduced with a nominal antecedent my folder, the meaning
of folder is not illustrated until move 2f, when Julian gestures to
the folder on the desk. However, this illustration of meaning is
coupled with the pronominal reference it rather than a nominal
reference. This could explain why one of the students says that he
doesnt know what Julian left at home. It would have been better
to introduce the folder into the discourse in the orientation of the
recount in move 1a. In the orientation, Julian states that he does a
little bit of work on his English every day. The inference is that the
folder is therefore important, but this is not explicitly stated. The
statement is also confusing, as it is unclear why an English teacher
would need to work on his English every day. It may be that Julian
has tried to nd a simple way to express the idea, that the folder,
which contains his CELTA notes, is important for his current CELTA
studies.
5.3. Cindy, Study Abroad
In this lead-in to an upper intermediate lesson, Cindy intro-
duces two cutout doll characters, Tom and Kate, who are young
British people moving to Australia. Cindy uses the characters to
elicit the vocabulary items study abroad and emigrate. She then
provides instructions for a group discussion on the type of person
you need to be to emigrate or study abroad. She attempts without
success to elicit vocabulary about personal qualities from the stu-
dents, and then herself provides an example of a personal quality,
courage.
8 P. Stanley, M. Stevenson / Linguistics and Education 38 (2017) 110
Cindy: 1a so Im going to start with a little story (.) 2a rst of all
this is Tom (.) (holds up male paper doll) 2b and Tom is currently
living in the UK (.) (pins Tom on whiteboard, next to map of UK)
2c but he hears about a program to go to university in Australia
for six months (.) 2d so now Tom is going to (.) in Australia
(.) (moves cutout doll across whiteboard to map of Australia.
Pauses mid-sentence and uses gestures to try and elicit study
abroad) 3a who can ll in the sentence for me? What is Tom
going to do in Australia? (.)(points to Tom on whiteboard)
Student: study
Cindy: 3b [inaudible] (twirling gesture with hand to elicit further
responses)
Student: [inaudible]
Cindy: 3c thats goo 4a >I was looking for study abroad
but that is even better cause thats what hes doing<
(makes rapid hand gestures and body movements) 2e so Tom
is going to study abroad in Australia (.) 2f and next Kate is also
living in the UK (.) (pins Kate on whiteboard, next to map of
UK) 2 g but shes sick of the rain and the cold weather(.) 2 h
so she decides to move permanently to Australia (.) (moves
cutout doll across whiteboard to map of Australia) 2i so Kate
is going to (.) (Pauses and points to Kate on whiteboard to try
and elicit emigrate)
Students: emigrate (in unison)
Cindy: 3d perfect (.) 3e move permanently (.) 5a so now in your
groups (.) just take one minute (.) and discuss (.) what type of
person you have to be to emigrate or study abroad (.) (moves
hands towards each other to indicate forming groups; points at
each doll) 5b go ahead and discuss (.) 6a can anybody else tell
me what type of qualities make up the type of person
that is willing to pack up and move (.) 6b so were looking
for specific qualities do you have anything(.) 6c okay maybe
you have to be courageous, you have to have courage to
do it, to go out on your own? (.) 6d anything else like that?
5.3.1. Student perspective
This excerpt prompted a lot of discussion among the students,
with opinion divided as to whether Cindys accent, which most
recognized as different, rather than as American, made for eas-
ier or more difcult listening. Some groups identied pace as an
issue, saying Cindy sometimes spoke too fast. Some students took
the discussion further than phonological intelligibility, with one
group teasing out that the teacher talk seemed to be scripted and
unresponsive:
French male: In my point of view, shes not really patient. With some
groups, you have to dig a little bit and try to ask
Swiss female: and make sure that the people is attending to you, are
understanding.
Czech male: Yeah, she cannot feel the feedback from students.
Several voices: Yeah.
Swiss female: Thats what I was going to say. Shes not worried in
having the feedback.
Czech male: She got the presentation
French male: Shes only worried in, teach, to do all the exercise, or
maybe following
Swiss female: Its automatic.
French male: the plan she had in her mind. So shes not even
Czech male: Its a presentation.
Swiss female: You know telemarketing? Its like that. . .
French male: Yeah, shes thinking to do a well job, but at the end its
not a good job because for me its not a good job,
sorry.
(Student focus group 6, original in English)
While students praised the visual support offered by the cutout
dolls as supporting understanding, all seemed to think that the
segment was about going abroad and reasons for going abroad
(e.g. dont like the weather, Japanese male, group 2, original in
English). No student groups mentioned the personal qualities task,
suggesting that overall understanding was limited.
5.3.2. Researcher perspective
Issues surrounding both context of situation and context of cul-
ture appear to play an important role in this vignette. In terms of
structure, the vignette can be divided into two sections: moves 1,
2, 3 and 4 relate to elicitation of study abroad and emigrate using
the cutout doll story, and moves 5 and 6 relate to the introduction
of the personal qualities discussion topic. As was pointed out by
the students, the cut out doll story in the rst section illustrated the
meaning of the intended vocabulary quite clearly. However, it did
not assist in creating a context of situation for the discussion in the
second section, which was the actual task. Cindy appears to have
misjudged what students nd difcult to understand. She uses the
story to illustrate vocabulary that is likely to already be familiar
to these upper intermediate students, yet underestimates the dif-
culty of the discussion topic. Without an appropriate context of
situation, even though the vocabulary in the discussion question in
5a is not difcult, no discussion ensues.
Context of culture appears to manifest itself in the ethnocen-
tric notion of emigration that Cindy presents as a privileged life
choice easily made in response to irksome aspects of life such as
bad weather (2fh). This is culture in the sense of small cultures
(Holliday, 2010), that is, the intersectional nexus of an individuals
identity markers including nationality but also, for example, social
class, economic status, level of education, profession, and so forth
(see Stanley, 2017, pp. 2135).
In this simplistic presentation of a complex notion, Cindy con-
siders neither the multitude of complex factors that might inuence
someone to emigrate, nor the realities of visa restrictions and prac-
tical difculties. Further, the upheaval and turmoil that may be
involved in emigration are not mentioned, although these would
preface the personal qualities task much more effectively than
the paper dolls. She also fails to connect with her students own life
experiences relating to their sojourn in Australia, or other countries.
Moreover, the juxtaposition of studying abroad and emigration in
Cindys question in 5a seems somewhat incongruous, as the two
situations seem to be so different. Lack of consideration of context
of culture may thus have contributed to Cindys lack of success in
starting the discussion.
When Cindy realizes that the students are nding the discussion
topic difcult, she switches from regulatory register (i.e. giving the
instructions) in move 5 back to instructional register in move 6 to
elicit qualities from the students. This shift back to instructional
register is accompanied by a marked increase in the complexity of
the teacher talk. When Cindy unexpectedly nds herself needing
to elaborate on the discussion topic, this unplanned teacher talk
becomes a complex maze of ideational and interpersonal mean-
ings. When she rephrases the discussion in 6b the interpersonal
and ideational choices are more complex than in the original for-
mulation in 5a. Similarly, when courageous is given in 6c as an
example, it is dened in terms of a derivation of the word itself (i.e.
courage) and also in terms of an idiomatic expression (i.e. to go out
on your own). In move 4, which represents a shift to commenta-
tive register in which Cindy articulates her pedagogical objectives
in eliciting the vocabulary, we also see a high level of syntactic
complexity, plus an unusually fast rate of speech.
6. Discussion
The current study has examined the teacher talk of novice tea-
chers from a critical intelligibility perspective, in which, rather
than taking native-speaker teacher talk as the gold standard and
describing its features, we have examined issues in the intelligibil-
ity of teachers own talk (rather than issues with students listening
skills), revealing difculties that the novice teachers appeared to
have in grading their language appropriately. We have examined
 P. Stanley, M. Stevenson / Linguistics and Education 38 (2017) 110
these issues through both a student perspective provided by the
focus group discussions and a researcher perspective provided by
the analysis of the spoken classroom discourse.
The focus group analysis showed that many of the students
were unable to follow the main ideas that the novice teachers were
attempting to convey. For each vignette issues related to phonolog-
ical intelligibility, such as fast rate of speech, unclear articulation,
and at intonation patterns were identied. This corroborates the
ndings of previous research regarding the importance of teachers
phonological intelligibility (e.g. Ivanova, 2011). However, for each
vignette some of the students went further in explaining why the
teacher talk was difcult to understand. In Holidays, student identi-
ed the back and forth shifts in the discourse as a source of difculty.
In The Folder, they indicated that gestures were helpful in suppor-
ting understanding, but that they could not connect the gestures
and the words; and in Study Abroad they identied that the teachers
lack of connection with students contributed to lack of understand-
ing.
The analysis of teacher discourse using a framework based on
key concepts from SFL allowed us to go further by unraveling com-
plexities in the interwoven strands of ideational, interpersonal and
textual meanings. In Holidays, textual and interpersonal meanings
were shown to be intertwined: the analysis revealed that back and
forth shifts in the discourse, such as those identied by Doherty and
Singh (2008), involved three distinct registers, and that each reg-
ister contained complex interpersonal meanings. In The Folder, the
interplay between textual and ideational meanings was prominent:
the use of mime in telling a story involved complex deictic shifts
in spatial relationships and combinations of verbal and non-verbal
cues that impeded the teacher in illustrating the meaning of key
words and expressions. In Study Abroad, in trying to explain the dis-
cussion topic of personal qualities, the teacher became enmeshed in
tangled strands of complex ideational and interpersonal meanings.
In addition, the notions of context of situation and context of
culture in our framework allowed us to illustrate the role of both
the immediate situational context and the broader cultural con-
text in the novice teacher talk; to reiterate, culture is dened
much more broadly than nationality and is taken to also incorpo-
rate other social markers such as class and generation, as these
powerfully inform how speakers understand the world. For each
of the three vignettes, problems in establishing a context of situa-
tion appeared to be at the heart of difculties in understanding. In
The Folder & Study Abroad, the contexts that were established did
not adequately prepare students for the tasks they were instructed
to complete, as the meanings that were illustrated that were not
central to these tasks. In addition, use of classroom techniques to
create a context appeared to impact negatively on intelligibility.
In Holidays, lack of clarity in the visual aids triggered a seemingly
unplanned cascade of teacher talk that threatened to drown the
listeners. In The Folder, while gestures supported understanding,
mismatch between words and gestures resulted in intelligibility
issues. In Study Abroad, the use of cut out dolls as realia contributed
to over-simplication of the concept of emigration.
The role of context of culture was also illustrated in Study Abroad,
as the concept of emigration was presented in a way that reected
a particular and perhaps rather privileged view of the world not
necessarily shared by the students, and that did not build a bridge
to the students own life experiences, or knowledge of the world.
The role of culture in intelligibility has been pointed out by Kachru
(2008), and our framework has enabled us to integrate culture in its
broadest sense as encompassing many factors, including ethnicity,
class, gender and age, that inuence a speakers view of the world,
as an aspect of intelligibility.
The study has, thus, illustrated how challenging it can be for
novice native-speaker teachers to grade their teacher talk to their
learners level of English. It has illustrated that language grading
9
goes well beyond choices concerning the use of voice, such as
rate of speech and articulation, and choices concerning choice of
words and structures to express ideas. It has shown that it also
includes choices about what is pragmatically appropriate, about
how to interact effectively with students, and about how to struc-
ture discourse in a coherent and cohesive manner. On top of all this,
teachers needs to create a communicative context that will enable
the effective illustration of meaning and they need to exercise
awareness of how students cultural backgrounds, life experiences
and personal characteristics may inuence their understandings of
the meanings the teacher is trying to convey. Thus, it appears that
effective language grading involves juggling many balls at the same
time. Teachers even those with much greater experience than the
ones in the current study may struggle to keep all these balls in
the air, and efforts to do so may result in cognitive overload, which
is likely to be exacerbated in situations in which teachers have the
added strain of being observed and recorded, such as in the current
study.
A limitation of the study is that is not possible to draw con-
clusions about whether difculties encountered by the teachers in
grading their language were associated with noviceness, native-
ness, or a combination of both these attributes. Lack of teaching
experience, nervousness at being observed and recorded, and lack
of awareness of how to grade language effectively are factors
likely to have inuenced the communicative choices made by the
three teachers. Future research could compare the teacher talk
of more experienced teachers and novice teachers. The unilat-
eral idiomaticity (Seidlhofer, 2001) of native speaker language
use has been identied as an important factor in communication
breakdowns between native-speakers and non-native speakers.
According to Kachru and Nelson (2001), native speakers are often
less intelligible for NNS listeners than are other NNS speakers.
Therefore, it would also be fruitful for future research to compare
the teacher talk of native-speaker teachers and NNS teachers with
similar levels of teaching experience.
All in all, we believe that the application of our framework has
enriched our insights into language grading. By including inter-
pretability, the tripartite Nelson intelligibility framework raised
awareness that understanding spoken discourse goes beyond
understanding the ideational meaning of words and utterances.
However, interpretability was dened solely in terms of illocu-
tionary meanings, which can be seen as broadly analogous to
interpersonal meaning in our framework, and did not include either
textual meaning, immediate context, or cultural context, all of
which this study has shown to be crucial in understanding spoken
discourse. The current study has provided an integrated frame-
work that can illuminate the interplay between different levels of
meaning, as well as contextual factors.
7. Broader implications
A broadened understanding is needed of what language
grading comprises and how it might be taught on English teacher-
training courses. Even where language grading is explicitly taught,
the emphasis tends to be on linguistic factors such as the speed of
speech, the use of pauses and logical staging to organize spoken
text, the use of high-frequency lexis, and grammatical simplicity
(while retaining accuracy and naturalness). However, as this study
has shown, language grading, as well as involving complex inter-
weaving of different strands of meaning, is to a large extent also
cultural in nature. This can be understood in the macro sense,
such as the way in which Cindys teaching of emigration was
seemingly compromised by her own implicit understanding of
the nature of emigration. But there is also a cultural component
of language grading at a more micro level: the CLT-style lesson
10 P. Stanley, M. Stevenson / Linguistics and Education 38 (2017) 110
set-up is a genre that appears to be quite specic to the small cul-
ture (Holliday, 2010) of communicative language teaching. This is
to say that, beyond linguistic factors of how well the novice tea-
chers may use their voices to convey information in class, their
teacher talk is also part of a genre that may well be unfamiliar
to their listeners. Thus even if they do manage to communicate
their intended meaning, the overarching purpose may neverthe-
less be lost on listeners. This is where language grading goes beyond
interpretability into the realm of culturally specic ways of mak-
ing meaning. Teacher educators would therefore be wise to include
large and small-scale cultural issues in language grading, as well as
focusing on language.
There is likely to be a need for language grading awareness-
raising and skill-development for all novice teachers, whether they
are teaching the English language or any other subject. Beyond the
English-language teaching context, novice teachers in compulsory
and post-compulsory educational contexts in multicultural-but-
monolingual educational contexts like Australia and the UK
regularly encounter students for whom English is an additional lan-
guage. Like some of the international tourists who simply walked
away from the impenetrable tour-guide commentary in Tasmania,
might it be the case that second-language listeners may switch
off, and metaphorically walk away, from teachers, whether native
or non-native speakers themselves, whose own English is insuf-
ciently graded for learners to understand? While much more
language-grading research is needed among schoolteachers and
post-secondary educators, evidence from this study suggests that
tailoring ones own English for international listeners is not nec-
essarily easy, even where teachers attention is explicitly drawn
to the need to grade their language and even where teachers are
procient in languages other than English.
Lastly, beyond education, those working in English in a myr-
iad of professional elds, for example in tourism or business, may
also need explicit awareness-raising, guidance, practice, and crit-
ical reection on language grading if their own English-language
communication is to be effective in international settings. Speakers
whose language grading is ineffective may suffer nancial penal-
ties: for example, tourists may be reluctant to sign up for tours that
they cannot understand.
In particular, native speakers of English from the US, the UK,
or Australia, for instance, may need help in using English to com-
municate internationally. Graddol (2006) makes this point with
reference to international business.
In organisations where English has become the corporate lan-
guage, meetings sometimes go more smoothly when no native
speakers are present. . . . [T]he problem may be that few native
speakers belong to the community of practice which is devel-
oping amongst lingua franca users. [Native speakers] presence
hinders communication.
(Graddol, 2006, p. 115).
Just as English language learners need to learn this variety, so
native English speakers and for that matter procient non-native
English speakers need to learn how to adjust their Englishes.
Research and teaching of language grading using an integrated
framework such as presented in the current study may be a rst
step in how this can be achieved. It is our hope that future studies
can make use of the framework presented in this study to critically
examine the intelligibility of discourse in a variety of contexts, both
inside and outside the classroom, including encounters, such as the
Port Arthur tour in Tasmania, where there is a compelling need
for speakers to adapt their English to accommodate international
listeners.
Acknowledgement
This study was funded by a School of Education research grant
from UNSW Sydney, Australia.
Appendix A. Supplementary data
Supplementary data associated with this article, i.e. videos of
the three lesson excerpts, can be found, in the online version, at
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.linged.2017.01.001.
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